


all this to say

by phollie



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen, Human!Cole
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-13
Packaged: 2018-03-07 11:47:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3172984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phollie/pseuds/phollie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Afterwards, all that changes about Cole physically is the air surrounding him. It’s louder now, erratic and confused and fumbling; Solas likens it to a small storm in the middle of spring, a downpour of rain upon slow-blooming flowers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all this to say

+

**all this to say**

+

                    Afterwards, all that changes about Cole physically is the air surrounding him. It’s louder now, erratic and confused and fumbling; Solas likens it to a small storm in the middle of spring, a downpour of rain upon slow-blooming flowers.

                    But on the outside, things remain just as they are: Cole’s eyes are still nervous and ringed with shadow; his face is still pallid, pale beneath an unwashed halo of hair touched with stray stalks of grass and hay from the stables; his mouth is always slung in an uncertain frown or hidden behind his hand as he pulls and twists at his lower lip with fidgety fingers; his body is still too long, too lanky, unfed and unslept.

                    He does take up room now – tangible space where he was once little more than a fleeting sigh of an afterthought to be brushed softly away into forgetting – but even that seems natural and expected in the course of things. It’s progress. It’s growth.

                    Solas is happy for him, or at least something remarkably close to it. Happiness, he thinks, is a faraway thing he can never look at directly, much like the sun; but there are moments, like watching Cole kneel down to beckon to a gray cat in the garden with a gently outreached hand, that Solas feels as though he could almost graze the gleaming surface of what “happy” must feel like.

                    He watches Cole for a few quiet moments before deciding to speak. “Are you enjoying yourself?”

                    Cole doesn’t look up, his head bowed against the hazel glow of the early morning sun. “I wonder what this world would be like,” he says, “if all people were cats.”

                    “It would be a pleasant world indeed. Much quieter, less conflict.”

                    “Cats have feelings,” Cole says, thoughtful with his hand still reaching out, “though they aren’t as loud as people’s. Bright sunlight skittering across a soft back, shoulder blades shifting beneath warm fur, eager to pounce…I think she might bite me.”

                    Solas feels himself smiling a little. “Perhaps it would be best to pull your hand away if she is feeling unfriendly.”

                    Cole gives a forlorn sigh, the sound of it as small as a thimble. He slowly straightens and looks down at the moody cat lurking by the trellis. “I thought it would be easier for her to come closer now that I’m realer.”

                    “Did she not come to you before?”

                    Cole shakes his head. “Not even when I would let her see me.”

                    “Try not to take it to heart,” Solas says, his voice easy and light. “Spirit or not, cats tend to maintain a safe distance between themselves and other beings.”

                    Cole blinks twice over, looking right at Solas with unwavering wonder. And he asks, “Like you?”

                    Solas lets out a breath. “Yes. Like me.”

                    “It’s okay. I think you would make a delightful cat.”

                    “Thank you, Cole. I am glad you think so.”

                    Cole looks down at the ground in a moment’s thought before meeting Solas’s eyes again. “Are there cats without hair?”

                    “Yes, there are.”

                    “Oh, good.” Cole’s gaze tilts up to the sky now, squinting against the sun. Solas ponders why he doesn’t look away from it and spare his eyes the discomfort, but Cole remains staring at the beams of yellow light slashing through the limbs of trees overhead with a dutiful sort of concentration, as if on the lookout for a lonely bird in the branches or a nest in danger of falling. When he finally speaks again, his voice is soft. “I like that it’s sunny out today, even if it’s still cold.”

                    Solas smiles. “I didn’t expect you to be the sort who chats about the weather.”

                    “It…does tend to change from day to day, doesn’t it?”

                    “Indeed it does. Though I was beginning to feel as though the sun would never come out again, what with all the rain as of late.”

                    Cole lets out a high tweet of a laugh, shoulders jumping with the sudden exhale of breath. “Now _you’re_ talking about the weather! _With_ me!”

                    Solas shows Cole his palms, smiling in a moment’s good-natured defeat. Cole looks upon the gesture and, after a moment’s thought, imitates it with a gentle lift of both hands. He lowers them when Solas does, his face pleasant and curious.

                    “Would you like to walk with me, Cole?”

                    Cole blinks. “Is there something important we need to be doing?”

                    “Plenty, but not at this very moment. Right now I would like to just talk with you.”

                    Cole half-turns to find the wary cat that remains in steadfast avoidance of him. When it makes no move to come any closer, Cole looks away from it with a sigh and nods. “I’d like for her to come with us. But I don’t think she wants to do that.”

                    “It’s alright. Perhaps she will come along another time.”

                    Cole gives a quiet hum and steps closer to where Solas stands, eyes to the ground. The two of them fall into place at each other’s side as they walk, Solas leading just one bare half-step ahead. “I meant to ask you,” he says, “where is your hat today?”

                    “Dorian wanted to borrow it,” Cole says, albeit uncertainly. “He said he had an idea that would make me look handsome.”

                    “I am surprised you allowed him. I know your hats are very dear to you.”

                    “I wasn’t sure at first. I thought maybe it was a bad idea, not because Dorian is bad, but because not having my hat is bad.”

                    “I understand.”

                    “But then he said something about flowers,” Cole says, a little brighter now as he toys with his bottom lip with his thumb and forefinger. “And I decided it was more good than bad, giving him my hat.”

                    Solas gives a knowing hum, his toes chilled from the cold dew of the grass seeping through the wrappings around his feet. “That does sound like a fair tradeoff. Are you excited?”

                    “Yes. I think so.” Cole quietly considers something for a moment. “Dorian has a gift for prettiness. The other day during an outing, he stood in the clearing of a dead and dusty field and his eyes panned right over the nothingness, panned right over it all as if it were merely a strange dream he could wake himself out of with one blink...he found a single daisy amidst the wreckage. He plucked it up and gave it to me.”

                    Solas watches the other’s profile carefully. “That was kind of him.”

                    “Yes. He said I looked just like it.” Cole swipes under his runny nose with the back of his sleeve, eyes to the ground as he shambles along the path. “And I said, ‘But Dorian, that flower isn’t wilted.’ And he said, ‘No, Cole, and neither are you.’”

                    “Do you feel as though you are wilted?”

                    Cole wipes his nose again and gives a loud sniff. Solas softly wonders if he’s coming down with a cold, considers the humanness of that. “Sometimes, yes. I think. I’ve been feeling things lately.”

                    “What sort of things?”

                    “Hungry. Sleepy.” Cole’s face is troubled now, trying to understand. “There are words for these feelings, but I don’t feel as though the words belong to me. I don’t _want_ to eat or sleep. I just want to _help_.”

                    Solas waits a few beats before asking, “Do you regret your decision to become more human?”

                    “No,” Cole says right away, earnest, almost loud. “No. I wanted to be something, but not two things at once…or not just half of one thing, half of the other, but not wholly anything. I wanted to be me.” Another sniff of his runny nose. “I just don’t want to eat.”

                    “Though you do feel hunger?”

                    “Unfortunately.”

                    Solas laughs, light and quiet. “Then I take it you don’t like the soup that Blackwell sets before you at suppertime?”

                    “ _No_ ,” Cole says, aghast. “It’s _dreadful._ It’s like _mud_.”

                    “We can find you something more suitable. It will take some exploring, but I think it will be worth it for you in the end.”

                    Cole lets out a long-suffering groan, shoulders slumping. “I’d prefer just exploring _people_.”

                    “You need energy for that, though, yes?”

                    Cole meets Solas’s eyes, looking tragic. After a moment, he looks away and back down at the ground, reaching up for an invisible brim of his hat that he realizes isn’t there only after his hand is already raised. “Energy,” he repeats on a mumble. “Yes.”

                    “How do you feel about sleeping? Is that any better for you than eating?”

                    Cole goes quiet. His eyes are heavy and distracted, avoiding. Nervous fingertips pull at his bottom lip and muffle his words as he fires them off on a frantic mutter. “A long sleep, the very longest, unchanging and unending. Sick shadows fall across the soul and silence it, a soft flower blooming and then…closing, petals falling onto a cold stone floor. The body collapses into itself and only the seed of it remains.”

                    Solas watches silently as Cole’s gaze returns to him, climbs back from a high place in which only Cole can see. He reaches for the nonexistent brim of his hat again and touches only air. “It’s hard,” he says. “The real Cole, he slept a lot. He didn’t know what else to do.”

                    He looks as though he might go on, but changes his mind after a moment and shifts the focus. “I’d like to talk about something different now.”

                    Solas gives a sage nod. “We can do that. Absolutely. What would you like to talk about?”

                    Cole considers the question for a while, brushing his palm back and forth against his forehead until his bangs are mussed and sticking up all over the place. After a few more moments, something seems to dawn on him, and he vocalizes it on a hoarse, quiet question. “Did you like me more before I became human?”

                    Solas gives a small start of surprise. Before he can respond, Cole beats him to it. “You asked me what I’d _like_ to talk about, Solas, but I don’t _like_ to think about what I just asked you…but the words toss themselves around in my head, loud, leering, leeching off of the better moments when things feel true and good. I don’t like to ask you that question, but I have to, or else it’ll keep shouting at me for an answer that I can’t give on my own.”

                    The two come to a stop in the middle of the path. Solas looks up at the other’s sad face just as Cole looks down and away from him. It isn’t often that Solas is speechless, but finding the proper words to reply with is more difficult that he could have ever anticipated. All that comes out is a question. “Cole…is that what you have been worried about all this time?”

                    Cole keeps looking at the ground, fiddling with his bangs with long, restless fingers. “Humans tire you, Solas. They’re loud and they take up space and they don’t mystify you. You don’t hate them, no, but you’d…rather be without them?” Another quick wipe under his runny nose with his sleeve. “And you said you like the company of spirits…that’s why I blinked when you asked me to walk with you. Because my company is different now.”

                    Something heavy settles in Solas’s chest as he looks closely upon Cole’s skittish face. Carefully he reaches towards him to touch his shoulder, settling his palm over the curve of it only when Cole doesn’t deny the contact. “Cole,” he says, soft, “I was fond of you when I first met you, and I am just as fond of you now. That has never been a subject of doubt or debate within me.”

                    Cole’s eyes are still fixed down at his boots, his face pensive but hopeful. “So I am someone that you would like to keep around?”

                    The wording of the question strikes Solas into a strange silence. He supposes he doesn’t truly know what it means to keep _anyone_ around, to actively seek out the keeping of someone – no, too occupied with avoiding, with denial and distance and all the other things that keep him far away from the reaches of the world and all its creatures. Solas wonders if Cole can feel that, if he can focus and see that looping train of wary thought dancing on the air before him; but Cole says nothing of it, just glances at Solas with an anxious expectancy that hurts a little to look at.

                    “I would like to keep you near,” Solas says carefully, “for as long as I am present here.”

                    Cole’s eyes are nervous for but a moment before quiet realization dawns visibly upon him.

                    “Do you understand?” Solas asks.

                    The soft corners of Cole’s mouth turn down in a thoughtful frown. “You won’t be here forever…”

                    “I suppose none of us will be. Though I suspect my own time in this place is even more…uncertain.”

                    Cole shakes his head, the movement small, his eyes fixed but searching on Solas. “No…you are certain of the leaving. The time is immaterial, golden motes of dust in the air that you can’t catch, but the leaving is a solid shape somewhere, sometime soon…”

                    Solas gives a weary smile. “Soon?”

                    Cole doesn’t answer him, just watches him with pale blue eyes nearly touched silver by the sun.

                    Solas lets out a sigh that tries to be pleasant but only comes out tired. “But for now, the time I do have here will have to be enough.”

                    It takes Cole a while to outwardly respond, frozen as he is in staring at Solas with that same haunted, searching gaze; but after a few moments, something in his expression softens into what could be called acceptance, albeit saddened. He gives a faraway nod as means of reply and turns his eyes down to the dewy emerald grass underfoot.

                    “Come along,” Solas says, gently touching the other’s shoulder again. “Let us walk. There may be another cat lurking somewhere about the grounds that may prove friendlier than the former.”

                    Cole brightens a little at that. “Do you think so?”

                    “I do. I have seen a few more by the barn if you would care to look.”

                    The two are quiet for the rest of the walk to the stables. Sometimes Cole hums a dizzy little tune here and there, interrupted by another sniff of his runny nose or a soft laugh at something he’s thinking about. Solas listens to the sounds he makes, those quiet little assertions of living that are brought out in the autumn sunlight, and he thinks  _this is where you belong, Cole, out here where it is bright and things are alive and always eager to meet you._

As it turns out, an orange tabby in the barn accepts the hesitant pats of Cole’s fingertips atop its soft head; Solas can hear it purring over the sound of Cole’s gentle laughter. Kneeling on the dusty barn floor, he looks like a figure in a mural, all straight golden lines of the sun slashing through the slatted roof and falling easily over his crouched form. In the middle of stroking the cat’s ears, he says, “I hope it has daisies in it.”

                    Solas blinks out of his thoughts. “Sorry?”

                    “My hat,” Cole says. “I hope Dorian uses daisies in it. I like knowing that I’m not wilted.”

                    Solas stares at the pool of light that Cole occupies until it seems to weave its way directly through the shape of him, cradling him in gold. Solas can’t tell if the light becomes the shape of Cole, or if Cole becomes the shape of the light. All the while, the blue shade falling over the corner of the barn remains its own private ocean that Solas swims within, half-drowning, quietly retreating from the warmth of the sun.


End file.
